Slashdot Mirror
When Customer Dissatisfaction Is a Tech Business Model
jammag writes: A new trend has emerged where tech companies have realized that abusing users pays big. Examples include the highly publicized Comcast harassing service call, Facebook "experiments," Twitter timeline tinkering, rude Korean telecoms — tech is an area where the term "customer service" has an Orwellian slant. Isn't it time customer starting fleeing abusive tech outfits?
Don't worry guys, the free market fairy will take care of it.
Where are customers supposed to flee to? Many of these companies are de facto monopolies in many areas or at the very least in lock-step with their "competitors." There aren't very many choices for tech companies unless you want to do without, which is unpalatable for many.
Required comment: the big corps have won. Deal with it.
Remember, if something is free you aren't the customer, you are the product and so long as they're not pissing off their advertisers these companies can do anything that doesn't significantly reduce their user counts.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Don't worry guys, the free market fairy will take care of it.
The free market has taken care of it. Good customer service is expensive. Consumers have demonstrated that they are unwilling to pay additional money for good customer service. Successful companies have aborted customer service to keep prices low.
Right after the BP oil spill, I stood outside my house and watched cars go into an AM/PM for gas. Right across the road was a Shell (not that Shell is innocent or anything). I thought to myself "BP just did a Bad Thing, why are people buying from AM/PM? It says 'part of BP' right on the sign!"
Perhaps it was habit? Perhaps it was that the gas was 5cents cheaper a gallon?
This still bugs me to this day. Five cents a gallon, with each person having approximately a 10-15gal tank.. They couldn't or wouldn't spend 50-75 cents to send a message.
There are already a lot of posts saying "where would they go to?". I get that. I do. But we still need to pull our heads out of our (not so) collective asses. There is only one thing that a company fears, and that is a drop in profit. As long as it's profitable to take advantage of us, they will. It's not THAT much effort to be a conscious consumer. People have been doing it with food. They just need to extend it to other things.
...FREE!
When I was a kid, I learned the signs of desperation...bad customer service and expiring food...the first sign of any store going south. All the companies that had success, treated their customers with respect and didn't do any pennypicking. The first sign is ALWAYS pennypicking, the second sign is worker efficiency followed by unhappy overworked workers. The third and last sign, is when they're lashing out on their customer base, trying to fault the customers instead of their products - simply because they can't afford to fix it (and basically because we wanted cheap stuff for free to begin with).
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
agreed, Lets stop trying to lump twitter changing their web page, and facebook experiments at the same level of comcast harassing customers. there is a major difference between the 3
no one pays to use FB or twitter, as such if they change their page for whatever reason, so what? if you dont like it go to myspace or whatever else is around or make a new site
comcast harassing callers, and the new info dropped about their 20% upselling grade for techs is a legit concern when it comes to customer dissatisfaction. I think you are watering down the severity of comcast when you lump in twitter and FB making changes to their pages
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
" Isn't it time customer starting fleeing abusive tech outfits?"
Sure, would love to move. Where do you want me to go, Boardwalk or Park Place?
No Facebook account (and blocked in DNS), no Twitter account (also blocked in DNS), not a subscriber of a Korean telecom, not a Comcast subscriber, switched providers when German Telekom failed to provide timely service to a business which I supported. Not using Chrome, not using Google apps on my phone, not shopping at Amazon. Going to quit Slashdot if they force Beta on me.
It's OK RMS, you don't have to post anonymously, we all know it's you.
The best (most profitable) customer is the one that can be bullied into puting up with your bullshit. The demanding ones, the ones who know how the service should work and cause trouble when it doesn't measure up are worth getting rid of.
Thank you, sir. May I have another?
Have gnu, will travel.
You don't have to put up with jerks.
For almost every crap business, there's a competitor that isn't crap. Find them.
The "free market" rewards greed in all forms. It is intended to reward these behaviors.
The entire purpose of capitalism is to turn the greed in human nature into a force of productivity. But the side effect is that it rewards that greed. One of the only things that can keep that greed in check is regulation. But that has a side effect of creating a separate power base and thus regulatory capture and barriers to entry and so on. So what's the next step? How do we watch the watchers? We need a new framework for productivity but I am confident we can find it. Civilization and democracy has reliably marched forward. The world has (mostly) ended slavery, brought reading and writing to the masses, eradicated diseases, put a man on the moon, and so on.
This science of "how much the consumer will endure" is not limited to tech companies -- nor even customers. This is the approach of the corporation to all matters, legal, financial, PR, lobbying, etc. Anyone who thinks otherwise is naive. Sure there are a few good corporations, and some acts of altruism and benevolence. But the "free market" rewards greed.
So we need a new framework for productivity, and we need to start looking now.
Isn't it time customer starting fleeing abusive tech outfits?
Fleeing to where? Some other company where the service is just as bad or worse?
I'm currently displeased with T-Mobile and the lies they told me about their "no overages fees" promise. I walked into AT&T and asked "how much to put your SIM in my phone?"
"$20 a month for 300Mb data, unlimited talk/text". Oh, ok!
"Plus $25/month to use a phone with that service." WTF? You can buy a service that requires a phone and then charge EXTRA to be able to use a phone with it? MY own phone, to boot?
I could understand if you were adding additional devices to the service (two phones sharing one plan, e.g.). I could understand a charge to get a phone from them. But I consider it dishonest to separate out the plan from any devices that you need to have to use that service. It makes the cost look artificially low.
$20/month! Great deal. $45/month, not so good anymore.
Adding in that they charge for texts coming through the email to SMS gateway despite being "unlimited text", the service was more expensive for less product. I could choose to send a message to T-Mobile but it would wind up costing me more per month, and I have no reason to believe that AT&T's customer service is any better than T-Mobile's.
So, it is likely that the idea of fleeing companies with bad customer service would only result in increased thrashing as 100 people move from company A to company B and 100 move from B to A, and 200 people find out that neither one is any good at helping them, and 200 people find out that they couldn't get as good a deal at their new provider as they had at the old.
There is also the issue of the devil you know vs. the one you don't. AT&T may have better service, but they probably don't, and I already know how bad T-Mobile is. Changing providers for no benefit, added cost, and potentially no better service is a lose for me and T-Mobile probably wouldn't even notice.